1 | Friday is for Poetry | Venerdi Poesia | “A Lake for the Heart | Il lago del cuore”

Hi lovely Eathlings!

Luigi Anderlini

for the summer yours truly has decided to share something really beautiful and personal. Her dad, Luigi Anderlini, was a really extraordinary person. A poet, memoirist, and intellectual who came from teaching and dedicated himself to politics, he was such a model of honesty that when the entire political class of his generation came under attack for corruption by the judicial system–in the early 1990s–yours truly never even doubted for a moment that he was at any risk of being found wrong. And he wasn’t!

Today, with rampant greed pervading civil life, mainstream media, and politics, with a whole new class of nouveaux riches–the new rich whose money was made in the digital revolution and is now embezzled out of the economy and into some tax havens, or paradisi fiscali as they say in Italian–this is so rare as to demand celebration!

Because her dad was a poet, and because he so loved nature that one might say he almost feel in love with it like an ecosexual would do, yours truly happily celebrates this occasion with the forthcoming series Friday is for Poetry, or Venerdi poesia, as Italians would say. The poems in this series are part of the collection her dad left for publication after his death, A Lake for the Heart, or Il lago del cuore. Yours truly had the privilege of doing the translation and introduction to the bilingual edition for Gradiva Press in 2005. This really helped her grieve the loss. The death of Luigi Anderlini was a bit like the death of an age in the world where he emerged as a public figure, Italy, and later Europe and the world. Her relatives kept asking, “aren’t you missing your dad?” She replied, “no, because I’m with him every day when I translate one of his poems.” Translators, especially good translators, really crawl under one’s skin. They penetrate our body and soul. Yours truly never felt as close to her dad as when she translated his poems. Many of them made her cry over and over. And revealed to her aspects of life beyond death. It was an intimacy forbidden in the secular world. And so she kept telling herself that this translation process felt a bit like post-mortem incest. Oh well . . .

Here she will reproduce the poems that stirred her emotions most, “The Lake,” “Women,” and “Lydia.” You lovely earthlings who will read the series will become familiar with the poet, the fine, sensitive person whose emotions became chiseled in words. The plan is to follow this with a short biography–the introduction to the collection–that will reveal more of the public figure and political person–the agent of change that Luigi Anderlini was in his era.

Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton

Oh, if more poets came onto the scene of politics! Obama, for one, is a good rhetorician, and–unlike his predecessor–he can spell. He is literate, a cultured person. And he can choose words. Words, in politics and everything else, are not “just words.” They are what stirs the imagination to make a transformed reality possible. Politics is a chiseling of words. Or not! Obama has distinguished himself as a chiseler, and yours truly’s dad, who was known in Italy for crossing the color lines, would have been so happy to know that a man of two races followed the dark years of the shrub era. When politics is not a chiseling of words, it can be a string of insults, a non-rhetoric of slander and offensiveness that only reflects the ignorance of those deluded enough to think that it it will benefit them, as in, say, the Tea Party Movement and its followers.

Poetry, however, is more than rhetoric, even elegant rhetoric. Poetry is a search for the soul. And that’s what the collection yours truly translated was. A man consciously approaching the last door, with the memory of a life lived in integrity, an authentic life, an imperfect life, a life that made sense. A man who chooses to dedicate time before death to chiseling the literary legacy of this life. A legacy where the most personal aspects and the most public ones are integrated, in a somewhat feminist fashion dare one say.

As you stay with the project, dear reader and lovely earthling, you will come across the premonitions of ecosexual love in some of Luigi Anderlini’s poems, and the legacy of questions from her father’s biography that came up for her, as yours truly explored the possibility of finding answers for them in the inclusive practices of love of which she is now aware.

The poems will appear every Friday at 11:00 AM.

Come back! And get your copy of A Lake for the Heart right away!